The Modern(ist) Mackintosh

The Modern(ist) Mackintosh Celia Marshik (bio) "No, Charles, I will not wait while you put on a Burberry." Dorothy Sayers, Unnatural Death (1927) The mackintosh in modernism sends a warning. Consider just two of the many examples. In the "Hades" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses, the reporter Hynes takes down the names of those who attend the funeral of Paddy Dignam. Hynes asks Leopold Bloom, — do you know the fellow in the, fellow was over there in the. . . — Macintosh. Yes, I saw him, Mr Bloom said. Where is he now? — M'Intosh, Hynes said, scribbling, I don't know who he is. Is that his name?1 The mysterious figure, henceforth known as M'Intosh, appears throughout Ulysses, known only by the coat that confers a spurious identity. The character's personal history is, however, a tragic one: he eats dry bread, a clear sign of poverty; he "loves a lady who is dead," a mark of mourning and loneliness; and he is identified by medical students as suffering from "trumpery insanity,"2 a sign of ill-health. A more violent example appears in the best-selling novel Not So Quiet. . . Stepdaughters of War (1930) by Evadne Price (published under the pseudonym Helen Zenna Smith). Price's text complements Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front through a narrative about English women who work for the war effort. The novel concludes with a horrific scene in which female volunteers are bombed as they shelter in a trench during an air raid. One character [End Page 43] meets a particularly bloody demise: "Blimey is bleeding from a wound in the arm . . . the blood is pouring from it. [. . .] Now see wot's 'appened to me new Burberry, all covered in blood,' she keeps muttering." Later, the narrator reports, "Blimey is unconscious from loss of blood. Her Burberry will never be any use again."3 In novels targeted at both high- and middle-brow readerships, the mackintosh, under its various incarnations, is more than just unflattering. It causes loss of individual identity; it cloaks the unscrupulous, deadly and cruel. It is even, apparently, a garment with a bull's-eye on it, protecting against the elements but not the violence of technological warfare. The irony of such associations is increased by the garment's very ordinariness; it was commonplace on the streets of major cities and in the wardrobes of people of all conditions and histories. At the same time, British literature of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s associates the mackintosh with a relatively uniform set of characteristics and suggests the garment was historically encoded with a range of qualities that writers drew upon in order to create characters and advance arguments. While the mackintosh was commercially and popularly aligned with positive traits, including technological innovation, protection, value and perseverance, writers of the period would emphasize the garment's less flattering connotations, including violence, anonymity, and the paralysis of individuals dwarfed by economic and social structures they could not transcend. The case of the mackintosh suggests that modernist writers used clothing to advance subtle analyses of both specific psyches and group behavior—to communicate, often quietly, a profound disquiet about the way bodies were imprinted by forces beyond their control. Scholars of modernist literature have examined representations of the mackintosh within individual novels and have explained what the garment signifies about particular characters, the limits of interpretation, and the social and ethical dimensions of each work.4 In contrast, this essay looks at the modernist mac by reading across a range of texts to excavate the cultural work the mackintosh performed. During first four decades of the twentieth-century, more and more people came to appreciate the power of clothing (whether fashionable or practical) to shape self-presentation and thus to assert a particular social significance and role. But clothing could also work against such efforts: as an animate object, clothing gathers meanings and connotations that individual wearers cannot always control or manipulate. The modernist mac is one such case. In this piece, I combine material history with cultural and literary analysis to suggest why the mackintosh became imbued with negative connotations and how knowledge of such connotations...